ED FISHER: The Civil War and White supremacy

In The Week (July 19, 2013, pages 40-41), Tony Horwitz summarizes current historians’ conclusions about the American Civil War. While it ended slavery, the underlying causes and costs of the conflict and the century and a half of racial prejudice since remove any glamour some find in the sesquicentennial of the most brutal war in our history.

By reviewing census data, historians now estimate that 750,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians died, and more than half a million were gravely wounded. Adjusting the figures for the increased population since the 1860s, the war would cost 7.5 million lives if the war were fought today.

Historian David Goldfield states that the war was America’s greatest failure. He indicates demagogue politicians, extremists, “and the influence of evangelical Christianity for polarizing the nation to the point where compromise or reasoned debate became impossible.” (Here, 150 years later we see the same situation in the U.S. House of Representatives, and to a lesser extent in Lansing.)

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He argues that while slavery was the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition the war’s greatest accomplishment, “white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.”

Gary Gallagher says too many Americans look at the Northern victory and emancipation and read the results backward: few Northerners went to war to free the slaves. They fought for Union. The Emancipation Proclamation was a means to that end. Had the South won a few more battles, the North may well have sued for peace.

Drew Gilpin Faust points out that the history of the Civil War has been mostly about generals, statesmen, and glory. She addresses “the killing, dying, burying, mourning, counting.” She compares the daily despair and bewilderment to that which is going on in Afghanistan and Syria.”When we go to war, we ought to understand the costs. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forget that. Americans went into the Civil War imagining glorious battle, not gruesome disease and dismemberment.”

William Fitzhugh Brundage says, “There’s a violence within and around the Civil War that doesn’t fit the conventional, heroic narrative. When you combine these elements, the war looks less like a conflict over lofty principles, and more like a cross-societal bloodletting.” Lincoln and others had recommended compensated emancipation of slaves. Economists have estimated the cost of the war in 1860s dollars at $10 billion. This would have more than covered the alternative. Lincoln’s proposal fell on deaf ears.

White Americans clearly failed to protect Black rights during Reconstruction and more than a century beyond. There is a wide, deep, malignant strain of White supremacy much alive today. We inherited this prejudice from Western European mythology. The nonsensical idea of “pure blood” in a species that interbred with anyone it came in contact with as it spread throughout the Earth is clearly false.

Yet, I know from my interactions here in central Michigan that many in the White community carry this prejudice like syphilis, spreading it to those allergic to it. Fortunately, those under 30 have some immunity and many of them are puzzled that anyone should be so out of touch.

Western Europe developed not because of skin color, but because of the redirection of human intelligence through the Renaissance in the 14th-17th centuries, and the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th -18th centuries. Unless we all accept this there is little hope for our democracy.